Critical Feedback

When it comes to improving any aspect of our life, few things are as important as the feedback that helps us identify potential areas of improvement. Ironically, giving critical feedback is super hard, and receiving it is even harder. Why?

I think this HBR article really nailed it when it said that the process of giving honest, critical feedback can be intensely uncomfortable and cause anxiety on both sides of the table. On one hand, the person giving the feedback may be worried that their feedback might irreparably damage their relationship with the recipient, the recipient’s self confidence, or both. On the other hand, the person receiving the feedback may be worried about its potential impact on their reputation and earning potential, so they naturally become defensive.

If critical feedback is super important (and I really think it is), we need ways to push through these emotional roadblocks. Below are some great ideas I found for doing just that.

Giving Feedback
Kim Scott, author of the really cool book titled Radical Candor said it best when she said the evaluation of feedback doesn’t happen at the giver’s mouth but at the receiver’s ear. To improve the quality of feedback you provide, here’s a few things you can try:

1. Care personally: As the saying goes: people don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care. Develop a genuine interest in the people you interact with on a daily basis. Learn their life stories, and frequently provide positive and critical feedback to show your commitment to their personal development.

2. Challenge directly: Make your feedback as clear and direct as possible. Sugar coating critical feedback reduces its value to the recipient, and while being direct may feel mean, it is actually the more caring thing to do.

3. Pick the right time: Critical feedback can get very emotional very quickly, which is why you need to pick the right time for the feedback session. As a rule of thumb, it’s best to separate these sessions from other emotionally charged topics like compensation or promotion reviews. If you don’t, all the recipient hears is “blah blah blah… promotion blah blah blah…” 🙂

Receiving Feedback
While improving your ability to give feedback is great, getting better at receiving feedback is even more important. Here’s three great ideas for doing this:

1. P . A . U . S . E: While we know we’re not perfect, it still sucks to hear it from someone else. Initial reactions to critical feedback include outright denial, assigning blame, and attacking the messenger. Therefore, you want to give yourself time to get to a place where you can constructively engage with the feedback. Take the time you need, and let the giver of the feedback know that you’ll check back in with them once you are ready to engage.

2. Separate the signal from the noise: All pieces of feedback are not created equal. In most cases, the critical feedback you receive may neither be specific nor actionable. In a few cases though, they will be. To find the diamonds in the rough, you have to deliberately and honestly evaluate each piece of feedback to figure out which you can learn from and which you can safely discard.

3. Resist the urge to go underground: We tend to avoid people after they give us critical feedback, and resisting this urge is beneficial in two main ways. First and foremost, these people provide us with the important insights we need to improve ourselves. Also, with the right approach, our harshest critics can become our greatest champions.

Critical feedback sessions are hard, and important. The good news is that the more frequently you engage in them, the more comfortable they seem to become.

 

Should You Always “Just Be Yourself”?

This is my first post after a very long time. I’m very excited to write it and I hope that there are many more posts that follow. Here goes:

The most common piece of advice you receive when preparing for a job interview, a presentation at work, or even a date is probably “just be yourself!”. This piece of advice is popular because choosing to be authentic – by narrowing the gap between what you think and feel inside and what you express outside – is generally a great strategy. According to Adam Grant, a professor at Wharton, when you have the freedom to express your thoughts and ideas, your energy soars, and so does your effectiveness. On the other hand, pretending to be who others want you to be can make you anxious, and hurt your performance.

A recent episode of the (really cool) WorkLife podcast called Authenticity is a Double-Edged Sword, referenced a study that found out that the more people focused on being themselves at work, the less successful they were in terms of performance reviews and promotions. Shocking right? While you want to work at a company that accepts your authentic self, there are some guidelines for expressing that authentic self in order to achieve an optimal outcome. Three guidelines discussed in the podcast are as follows:

1. Authenticity without credibility is ineffective
When you demonstrate authenticity by revealing your personal vulnerabilities, people like that and become more open to being influenced by you. There is a catch though: this only works if you’ve already proven your competence. A recent study of lawyers interviewing for jobs found that the lawyers who focused on expressing themselves only increased their odds of getting hired if their resume had already impressed the interviewer. To effectively increase your influence of others, you want to strive for high competency and high warmth.

2. Authenticity without empathy is selfish
While it’s easy to think about authenticity as being all about you, the effect you have on others has to be part of that equation. For example, if your colleague shares an idea with you that you think is really bad, expressing your “authentic” opinion without paying attention to how it is being received by your colleague will very likely put them on the defensive, and reduce your ability to influence their idea. Your feedback would have been authentic, and highly ineffective.

3. Authenticity without status and trust is risky
You may sometimes find yourself in a situation where your authentic self runs counter to the dominant culture of an organization. Examples of this include giving public critical feedback in a team that prefers private feedback, or going home early in a team that regularly meets for drinks after work. In either case, choosing to remain authentic and refusing to conform to the dominant culture of the team could get you sidelined and reduce your influence on the team. On the other hand, research suggests that pretending to conform is a sure way to burn yourself out.
When you find yourself in an organization whose dominant culture is different from yours, you should challenge that culture. Before you do that though, you need to demonstrate your value to the organization, and loyalty to its goals. You also need to frame your challenge to the organization in terms of how they help spur progress towards the achievement of its goals.

A final note on authenticity is that while it can sound that way, our authentic selves are not fixed but continuously evolving. As we go through life and encounter new people, experiences and challenges, our authentic selves evolve and we have to embrace that if we want to become more effective people. I like how Herminia Ibarra – an organizational behavior professor at London Business School – put it: ” does being authentic condemn you to being as you always have been?”